Over the last decade, digital communication networks employing personal computers (PCs), the Internet and other components, have increased levels of communication and access to information by an incredible degree. In the beginning, most of these networks were effected using hard-wired technology, but today, wireless digital services over GPRS (general packet radio service), CDMA (code division multiple access), Mobitex, DataTAC and similar systems are expanding the digital communications and data access revolution in a mobile environment. Wireless email, digital paging and Internet browsing via portable devices, for example, are now widely used.
Users of wireless telecommunication systems demand the very high levels of reliability that they have became accustomed to from hard-wired telephone networks (often referred to as “five-9s” reliability—less than one failure in 99,999 calls). However, administering a reliable wireless data service is much more difficult than hard-wired communications, not only because wireless transmissions are more prone to noise and interference, but also because many of the communications travel over a number of disparate communication networks between the service provider and the end user, often including packet-switched networks such as the Internet, circuit-switched networks and wireless telecommunication networks. While communications can move smoothly from one network to another, the protocols necessary for more complex operability such as monitoring network health are not standardized across such diverse networks.
The monitoring and analysis of network health information is critical to implementing reliable wireless data networks. As will be explained, existing systems do not facilitate effective network health monitoring and analysis.
An exemplary wireless data service network is presented in the simple block diagram of FIG. 1. In this example, a mobile node 10 is currently being served by a carrier network 12A, which will include at least one, and probably multiple wireless base stations which are organized into “cells”; each cell covering a certain geographical area. The carrier network 12A may use both hard-wired and wireless communications to connect these base stations and other infrastructure components together. This carrier network 12A may even use frame relay networks, optical networks, the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the Internet as part of its network.
The carrier network 12A generally serves as a conduit between the mobile node 10 and the wireless data service provider infrastructure 14, simply passing digital packets back and forth between these two parties, without considering the content of the packets themselves.
Because the mobile node 10 is mobile, it may pass from the region served by one carrier network 12A, to another, such as carrier network 12B or carrier network 12C. Methods are known in the art for “handing off” communications from one base station to another within a given carrier's region, or even handing communication off from one carrier to another. However, handoff situations make the health monitoring task far more complex as there is no standard for the collection and communication of performance data. The network of FIG. 1 is intended simply to present a context for the problems in the art to be described. The details of a complete implementation of the network would be clear to a skilled technician.
In addition to offering reliable systems, the stakeholders of these wireless data networks want to optimize the use of their resources, offer cost effective services to their customers, and obtain some insight into where future infrastructure investments can best be made. This can only be done if they have a detailed understanding of the traffic flow and the performance of their network and network components.
Unfortunately, carrier networks are not designed to perform the collection, collation and analysis of real time data that would be necessary to do this network health analysis. Even if special hardware and software were added to the carrier networks 12A, 12B, 12C to perform the data analysis (in the form of servers, for example), the core network nodes do not have the functionality to perform the collection and collation tasks, for at least the following reasons:
1. Many of the nodes in these networks are designed to simply route digital packets, so major software (and possibly hardware) changes would be needed to provide the collection functionality;
2. Many of these nodes are optimized to perform their tasks as quickly as possible, so that real time operation can be maintained. Providing the extra functionality of analyzing network health may slow down their operation to an unacceptable level;
3. In some carrier networks, changing the functionality of the network nodes would require updating, testing and trouble shooting to be performed on each node individually—an expensive and time consuming exercise; and
4. While some nodes in one carrier's network may be adaptable to performing such functionality, it is unlikely that the whole network will. If the carrier uses a variety of networks and components including wireless, hard-wired, fiber optic, PSTN, Internet, frame relay and packet switched technologies, it may be impossible to obtain the necessary data uniformly throughout the entire network to obtain meaningful and useful data.
In other words, carrier networks are not in a position to obtain the network health data that they desire.
There is therefore a need for an effective method and system of collecting network health information in wireless telecommunication networks which avoids or addresses the problems outlined above.